THE ECONOMIC HORROR, Viviane Forrester

We are living within a masterful delusion, a vanished world that artificial policies pretend to perpetuate. Our concepts of work and therefore unemployment, around which politics plays out (or pretends to play out), no longer have substance: millions of lives are ravaged, destinies are annihilated by this anachronism. The general imposture continues to impose the systems of an outdated society so that a new form of civilization, already emerging, goes unnoticed, a civilization where only a very small percentage of the global population will find roles. The extinction of work is seen as a mere eclipse, whereas, for the first time in history, the majority of human beings are less and less necessary to the small number who shape the economy and hold power. We discover that beyond the exploitation of people, there was something worse, and that, faced with no longer even being exploitable, the multitude of people deemed superfluous can tremble, and every person in that multitude. From exploitation to exclusion, from exclusion to elimination...?

In a completely fresh tone, Viviane Forrester, in a very well-documented analysis, denounces the usual discourses that mask the signals of a world reduced to being nothing more than economic, and of which, they warn us, we are becoming the superfluous expense.

Viviane Forrester, novelist, essayist, is the author, among other works, of La Violence du calme, Van Gogh ou l'enterrement dans les blés, Ce soir, après la guerre. She is a literary critic for Le Monde and a member of the Fémina jury.